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[German Version] (May 15, Straßburg [Strasbourg] – Apr 3, 1961, Cologne), architect and city planner. Influenced by the Liturgical Movement (R. Guardini) and critical of historicist architecture, Schwarz strove to give church buildings a universally meaningful, “resacralized” form. Interiors with a clear geometrical design, control of light, and reduction of appointments (lamps, armoires) communicate the direct involvement of the building and the assembled community in the liturgical action (expansion of Burg Rothenfels am Main of the ¶ Catholic Jugendbewegung [III] Quic…

[German Version] (Oct 20, 1632, East Knoyle – Feb 25, 1723, London), the most highly acclaimed English architect of the Baroque period, who popularized the Neoclassical architectural idiom in England. After a broad academic and scientific education, he devoted himself to research and teaching; he did not take up architecture until 1661 (renovation of Old Saint Paul’s, London; study in Paris). After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Wren was responsible for the rebuilding of 47 city churches, emplo…

[German Version] (Mar 1, 1812, London – Sep 14, 1852, Ramsgate, Kent), English Gothic Revival architect (like his father, Augustus Charles Pugin, and his son, Edward Welby Pugin), craftsman, and writer. Pugin had a broad influence on the 19th-century rediscovery of medieval art (George Gilbert Scott, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, arts and crafts movement). Influenced by the Catholic reform movement in England (with his own conversion to Catholicism in 1835), Pugin preached the “authenticity” and beauty o…

[German Version] I. Liturgy The sacristy ( sacristia; historically also secretarium,sacrarium, or vestiarium) is a separate room in a church building, usually near the altar, that communicates with the body of the church. It serves various purposes meant to be kept from public view. The word’s ultimate derivation from Latin sacer, “holy, sacred,” suggests its use as a place to store the sacred liturgical implements, paraments, and vestments (Vestments/Paraments, Vestments, Liturgical), as well as the liturgical books. The consecrated elements of the Eucharist ( reliqua sacramen…

[German Version] I. Bronze Age to Late Antiquity It is important to distinguish between a sarcophagus to hold a dead body, an urn for the ashes of a person who has been cremated, and an ossuary to hold the bones of the dead after the flesh has decayed (see also Burial). These receptacles were generally buried; they were not visible and were therefore simple. In some areas and in some periods, it became customary to make them out of marble or other kinds of stone and decorate them with representational or ornamental reliefs. In Greek areas sarcophagi were the exception (6th–4th cents. bce). The E…

[German Version] (Département Haute-Saône), Marian pilgrimage church in the French Jura destroyed in World War II (1944), and rebuilt between 1950 and 1955 by the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier (Church building: II, 4.b.β; illus. 87). The basic design of the hall church is a trapeze, with sides sweeping outwards, and the construction is of thick, undulating, and slightly sloping walls, surmounted by a roof skin that billows upwards and juts far out, rising to the east. The inside, faintly lit through slits and by a row of…

[German Version] The original London cathedral, begun by Bishop Mellitus in 604, was replaced between 1087 and 1148 by a three-aisle Romanesque church more than 100 m long. The crossing tower, completed in 1221/1222, was extended at the beginning of the 14th century; until destroyed by fire in 1561, it was some 150 m high. The crypt and choir, proportional to the nave, were constructed between c. 1258 and 1327 (esp. in the last quarter of the 13th cent.), modeled on Ely Cathedral (choir ending in …

[German Version] I. General – II. The West – III. Theology and Practical Theology – IV. Orthodox Churches – V. Asia, Africa, Latin America I. General Churches are built to provide a physical setting for the Christian celebration of the Eucharist, in order to shelter it and also to give it a place of prominence set apart from the outside world. The Bible does not discuss the legitimation and need for churches as distinct structures; historically, church buildings made their first appearance at th…

[German Version] (Lat. cappella, also: oratorium, sacellum, aedicula). A chapel is a sacred space, often small, and not independent in terms of canon law (Church architecture); it is usually used exclusively for prayer and worship. From the late 9th century, the term, derived from the cloak relic ( cappa) of St. Martin of Tours, referred to the royal treasury of relics and insignia, the court clergy, and the oratoria of the royal palatinates; the most important of them, the palatinate chapel in Aachen, was erected…